Art inside out's residency "other choreographies, new spaces" based on the concept of critical tourism

by

Petra Johansson & Cecilia Gelin

We are all tourists. Our desire to escape daily life and reality leads us to seek out unfamiliar places and situations. Issues such as threats to the climate, immigration and the pandemic, are now affecting the way we move and travel. New contexts and overlooked stories and details create other relationships, and other choreographies and spaces. Can a new kind of attention make way for changes within ourselves and our view of a place? The residency’s theme is inspired by the book/project “Tourists Like Us. Critical Tourism and Contemporary Art Practices ”(Vilnius Art University Press / ECAV 2013, editors: Federica Martini and Vytautas Michelkevičius and researcher Jurij Dobriakov, has compiled a “Glossary of Critical Tourism” where he re-approaches the main spectral concepts condensed from a long reading list on tourism and travelling. Can the glossary help us reflect upon such notions as place, identity and travel? – Familiarity/Estrangement – Gaze/Bodily involvement – Getting there/Getting lost – Hospitality/Hostility – Spectacle/Authenticity – Distance/Intimacy – Tourist/Vagabond – Wish/Desire 

The residency holds a special interest in microhistory, a study of the overlooked detail where the starting point can be a place, an event, a group of people or an individual. Participating artists: 

FRAUD (London) is an art-research duo (Audrey Samson + Francisco Gallardo) who´s background includes critical practices, postcolonial and critical feminism, performance, computational culture, design and space system engineering. They develop forms of art-led inquiry into the multiple scales of power, governability that flow through physical and cultural landscapes. In 2020, FRAUD critically investigated sand as a material in relation to tourism and labour in the Canary Islands. In Halmstad, they are interested in continuing working with sand and, by extension, glass. 

Paribartana Mohanty (New Delhi) is a storyteller, who works with a variety of mediums including video, performance, painting and sculpture. Based on a place or a situation, he examines layers of time and activity in the city. Oral storytelling, street painting and cooking serve as methods for participants and audiences to meet in Mohantys´s art. ”WALK ON THE GRID: Yantras and Choreographies” is the title of Paribartana Mohanty´s investigation in Kungsbacka. 

Henning Rehnström (Stockholm) is an artist who works with installation and video. Through film, he brings forward and makes visible our ways of seeing, inverting the observing gaze and the camera lens towards the outside world into a tool for introspection. In his artistic work, Rehnström dreams of escaping from the linear, patriarchal and Eurocentric storytelling. In Kungsbacka Henning Rehnström is particularly interested in Trojaborgar (a kind of stone labyrinths) along the coastline of Halland. His work revolves around power and knowledge production, desire and loss, science and mythology, people, elephants and labyrinths. 

Moi Tran uses a multi-disciplinary and a research based practice to create live performance, video, object making, music, text and installation to examine the way social, ecological and political technologies shape our private, social and geographical identities. Collaboration and examination of a common emotional vocabulary underpin her art. Tran works with performers including poets, dancers, actors, community-performers from transnational identity groups to challenge conventional performance making and the performer/viewer exchange, using improvisation and duration to investigate alternative ideas of protest and resistance. In Halmstad Moi Tran is interested in getting in touch with other stories and other voices: From what position do we speak?